TGV unveils high-speed trains of the future | Hacker News Reader

TGV unveils high-speed trains of the future

cnn.com

129 pointsingve159 comments

" the first test phase will start in the Czech Republic at the end of 2022."

Interestingly, while we have 0 km of passenger high-speed rail in CZ, we have a testing facility that half of Europe uses when testing their high-speed trains. [0].

Hey, at least something.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velim_railway_test_circuit

Are there any high-speed rail lines in planning in Czechia? I am desperate for a high speed Berlin-Prague-Vienna link.

There are, but, as we say in Czech: "the paper can tolerate anything". I will certainly be opening a bottle of Malbec the day when the works actually start.

HSRs would be very useful, as the contemporary railway network is badly overloaded and at the edge of its capacity. Every irregularity, including planned repairs, unleashes a hurricane of delays all over the main corridors.

"Papier ist geduldig" (Paper is patient) would be the german equivalent.

Cheers :-)

Yes, a new high speed line will be built between Dresden and Prague, mostly in tunnel to replace the current slow and restricted line which had to stay in the river gorge.

Munich-Prague is even worse. 5 1/2 hours by train for a 300 km trip.

Build two cities, quick!!, on the two ends of the testing facility!

It's a circle!

50% savings right out of the gate

I don't normally update comedy, but this tickled.

- "In 2022, we don't want to go faster"

Yes we do!

- "the goal instead is high speed trains that accommodate more people"

No; we want legroom.

- "...while consuming less energy"

We don't want that either. Isn't your electricity nuclear power anyway? What's the problem with consuming too much clean energy? You're in direct competition with airline travel, so every bit of increased consumer attractiveness is a *net social benefit* with regards to climate change. What exactly is the hangup?

Smells like cost-cutting MBA's shoving through unpopular changes, with a sugarcoating of social responsibility. This future sucks. I want my atomic flying cars back.

> Isn't your electricity nuclear power anyway? What's the problem with consuming too much clean energy?

According to a 2019 poll, 69% of French people believe that nuclear "contributes to producing CO2 and climate change". (34% answered "a lot", 35% "a little", 13% "not really", 17% "no")

Source: https://www.bva-group.com/sondages/francais-nucleaire-sondag...

Well, it does. Nuclear plants have very high embodied carbon, as they're made out of large amounts of steel and concrete.

That's obviously not as bad as a coal plant or even a gas plant. But 'a lot' is still probably correct.

Over their 40+ years lifetime it becomes negligible.

Maybe? Because climate change is a self-feeding cycle, releasing large amounts of CO2 early, then amortizing that over decades of operation, is worse than a constant steady release.

I guess you're probably right, nonetheless. It just annoys me when people post polls like this to prove that people in general are stupid, when polls generally show that ordinary people everywhere are way better on climate issues than political elites.

Concrete absorbs CO2 as it cures. If you add a bit of titanium dioxide it doubles the amount of absorbed CO2.

Can a nuclear plant produce enough energy to capture all the carbon emitted in its construction? While still being profitable, obviously.

Just thinking the problem through, I think that's very unlikely, unless you're in a pathological situation.

So, for a nuclear plant to be profitable in a competitive market, it needs to produce energy for less than its competitors. If its competitors don't have to pay to capture carbon (through money or output) then they are always going to be cheaper per watt, and the plant is going to become unprofitable.

The only way that would work is if you had chronic electricity undersupply (v. likely but also pathological) or if nuclear plants were way more efficient than alternatives (the opposite is true).

Generally the argument for nuclear is you need a diverse range of energy sources to have a stable power supply, not that they are a great 'bang-for-buck' option. (An argument I agree with, fwiw).

EDIT, PS: It's worth keeping in mind that carbon capture is largely an unsolved technical problem, and I think it's perfectly feasible that it will never be solved. The basic idea of burning fossil fuels for energy, then using energy to recoup the carbon from the atmosphere, just makes no sense at all. There's no world where this would be cheaper than just not releasing the CO2 in the first place.

If you made all the alternatives also pay to capture their carbon cost, I think nuclear would be very competitive.

Obviously it blows fossil fuels out of the water, but hydroelectric also uses huge amounts of concrete, and IIRC the energy return on investment (MWh you get out per MWh it takes to construct) for solar and wind is quite poor and so I'd expect that to take a while to pay off too.

Nuclear has a vastly worse EROI than grid PV solar. Nuclear lasts longer which somewhat offsets construction costs, but needs a vast workforce continually and a maintenance and power simply to operate.

As a sanity check, sub 2c/KWh solar can’t require that much energy simply because energy costs money. Nuclear on the other hand ends up having ~1,000 workers drive somewhere for 50 years which also takes energy, but that’s often ignored.

That said, people love to come up with all kinds of irrelevant comparisons using vastly outdated data to make things look worse for solar while ignoring Nuclear’s downsides. For example France’s capacity factor fell below 70% when they tried to ramp up production and things would look even worse on a 100% nuclear grid.

It seems highly unlikely that grid PV solar has a higher EROI than nuclear and I can't find anything that supports this either (I find plenty of graphs supporting the opposite).

Most of those are from fossil fuel or nuclear shills. You can get wildly varying numbers based on what you include and exclude.

Meta analyses say current/upcoming techs are about as good or maybe a bit better, but energy payback time is significantly lower due to reduced lifetime. Additionally the GHG impact of nuclearand wind isn't quite proportional to energy payback time because of concrete.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8118077

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

Really though the answer is both are fine and nuclear probably wins once you include a mix of wind, hydro and storage. And embodied emissions will go down as low carbon energy becomes a bigger share.

The main arguments against new nuclear are political (making new oil barons but with nuclear is stupid among other problems) and opportunity cost (using a nuclear reactor to replace 1GW of fossil fuels 80% of the time uses the same resources as using renewables to replace 10GW of fossil fuels ~40% of the time -- some of which is uncorrelated -- but at much longer delay).

I largely agree with what you said, but that 80% capacity factor is rather nuanced.

Nuclear’s capacity factor varies quite a bit depending on the local grid. France’s averaged below 70% while US nuclear reactor’s where generally over 90% largely due to the local energy mix. Solar is running into similar issues as it scales, but they both can greatly benefit from energy storage. The issue is nuclear power is so expensive it makes energy storage less appealing.

So, if we are talking about a potential grid with 30% nuclear 10% hydro and the rest solar and wind then nuclear could have a 90+% capacity factor and mostly be offline in the spring and fall when seasonal demand is low. Unfortunately that means Nuclear isn’t going to scale and help with global warming. On the other hand if you want a 90% nuclear 10% hydro grid then nuclear is going to have something like a 40% capacity factor without a great deal of energy storage.

In the context of "turn the most gas and coal plants off per dollar ASAP", I think 80% is pretty reasonable. Especially when you include things like plants that were paid for but never opened and various safety shutdowns.

Similarly 25-30% for solar and 60% for wind with them being anticorrelated enough that you can call an equal mix ~40% over all.

The other benefit is solar+wind incentivises storage development in a way that nuclear does not. Cost-wise, for many applications it's optimal to overbuild by a factor of 2 or 3 just to get energy in the sides of the energy curve. This results in energy that has been paid for, and can be turned on or off in milliseconds but has no value at 11am.

Many storage technologies become viable at $10-20/MWh that need further development to be viable at higher price.

That’s a reasonable point, but I think it’s still overestimating the value of adding new nuclear power plants when you already have significant nuclear capacity.

It’s clear the average capacity factor falls when you add more nuclear power. In other words rather than looking at the average capacity factor as being X%, you need to consider how much the average capacity factor falls with each additional reactor and then calculate what the effective capacity factor of that reactor must have been to hit the new average.

To illiterate if 10GW averages to 80% and 11GW averages to 79% then the 11th GW must have effectively been 69%, because (80 * 10 + 69) / 11 = 79.

I would say the main arguments against nuclear are political; the waste storage problem and a fear for accidents. There can also be laws against building new nuclear plants or taxes that disproportionally disadvantage nuclear. The huge capital costs don't speak in favor of nuclear either, but I do wonder how the other aspects affect even considering to build new plants.

I don't really follow your opportunity cost argument. Do you mean the price of 1 plant equals the price of 10GW renewables? Are you taking into account the fact that you have to replace the renewables after about 20 years while you can run a new plant for about 60 years?

After selling electricity from a solar power plant you should have enough money to build it’s replacement in less than 20 years.

Both Nuclear and Solar get subsidies, but grid Solar generally doesn’t need them.

I was wondering if that was part of the calculations or not. It's capital that needs to be accounted for if you want to compare energy sources.

The existence of subsidies shouldn't really matter, the end consumer pays for them some way or another and you factor this into the total capital cost.

At $0.8/gross watt and 25% capacity, solar breaks even at around 20 years at 2c/kWh. At 3c/kWh you can also cover interest and upkeep and make a net profit. Prices are falling double digit percentages every year. The story is similar for wind, although prices are no longer falling rapidly.

2-3c/kWh for nuclear takes care of your variable costs of operation. You will never pay back the building costs at 3-4c/kWh.

The financial payback time for renewables is shorter than the build time for the nuclear plant, whereas the nuclear plant will need subsidy to stay on after 20 years or so.

Ie. if I have $10 billion right now, I can spend it on nuclear. In 15-20 years I will have ~0.8-1GW of net capacity that will begin to produce energy at a marginal cost of 3 to 4 cents per kWh and nothing in the bank.

Or I can spend it on ~4GW net of solar. In 20 years I will have my original money back, a modest profit, and a mostly worn out system that will conservatively produce ~1-2GW net at a marginal cost of around 1c/kWh for another ten years. Additionally industry trends imply that half of my money will buy me 6-8GW net of capacity in the same space if I simply replace the panels with 30-40% efficient ones (as over half of the current costs are land, permiting, and frame).

The outlook is not quite so compelling for wind, or high latitudes, but it still blows nuclear out of the water.

The story also looks a little better for nuclear if you're anticipating green hydrogen or ammonia costs to be prohibitively high or you decide to bulldoze the fossil fuel plants rather than using them as part of a chemical storage system. Additionally if you are anticipating energy growth nuclear looks good in the short term (but after 60 years we're basically back at square one arguing about thermal pollution rather than CO2)

That's the LCOE perspective, but the costs for the end consumer include ancillary functions that the TSOs have to procure or build out themselves. So far I have not seen an electricity grid with a high penetration of renewables that has resulted in lower total costs, which isn't that weird considering the price for a highly distributed grid is complexity.

Thermal pollution doesn't have to exist for newer plants, you can use the waste heat for district heating. If we assume there are no political forces that try to stop this (big if), then it becomes a purely economical calculation to see if it makes sense.

In another comment you mentioned 40% capacity factor in a system with equal parts wind and solar. This seems a little high right now. The best performing offshore parks are around 55-60%, but it's usually lower. For onshore it's 25-35% and offshore is 35-50%.

Have you got any solid info on current and projected total system costs? I can only find repetitions of a single UK somewhat optimistic study citing 10-14gbp (and limited in scope to 30% renewable mix) or vague fear mongering from fossil fuel interests.

As you probably know, it's messy and not entirely straightforward to get any decent numbers on the whole picture. Which is my roundabout way of saying that my sources could be better, but I do believe it helps paint a picture. Total system costs will increase because of stabilization measures that need to be taken now that we're moving towards a grid with a lot of variability, this includes but is not limited to various types of storage and frequency stabilization. The increased transmission capacity between countries and an increased number of transmission cables to connect all the remote wind turbine parks to the grid will also add to the costs.

[0] looks at Germany specifically, the report was put out by VDE which is a large technical branch organization [1].

Check out the slide on page 17 [2], it has projected wholesale costs for 2030. The median price isn't going down and the span is getting much bigger than during previous time periods. This doesn't show the total system costs, but we would clearly be in a grid with a high variability and this would result in cost increases as mentioned. This can be seen in [4], on page 16 they specifically mention "The rapid increase in investments in electricity distribution networks could moreover be correlated to the increase of the share of distributed electricity generation (especially from renewable energy sources) in the period and electrification in general." And yes, I know that correlation is not causation.

There is also this report [3] that does look at the total picture. The conclusion there is that it is better to have a mix than 100% renewables basically.

[0] https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/german-ele...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDE_e.V.

[2] https://www.ceps.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/03082019%20CE...

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191...

[4] https://trinomics.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Final-Report...

You can easily come up with some wildly different numbers but …

2013 Meta analysis puts nuclear at 14:1 EROI. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

You can find numbers all over the place for solar here’s something back in 2015 that goes as high as 34.2 : 1 depending on design and location: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640... and of course the best numbers have improved dramatically over the last 7 years. At the other end, Solar in Alaska obviously has much worse numbers.

It’s really interesting how much you can twist these numbers. For example the electricity to run equipment like pumps, computers etc at a nuclear power plant. It’s easy to call them as an input when the power plant is offline, but during operation are they actual cost or should the be treated as an inefficiency where only the external inputs count.

Yeah while EROI is supposed to be some sort of objective value, it is of course extremely sensitive to the data you put in. It is hard to even agree on what to include and where to draw the system boundaries. LCA suffers from the same issue but I do feel like EROI gets abused more for ideological purposes than LCA, I think LCA as a concept is a bit more robust by now. I mean this in a general sense, I'm not pointing fingers here.

Obviously it's impossible to burn fossil fuels to capture carbon and remain carbon-negative. But that doesn't necessarily hold true for nuclear, solar, and wind. It might still be true, but it's plausible.

Several orders of magnitude over, yes.

This is loosely measured by EROI (energy return on invested). Concrete muddies the water slightly as it's a non-energy ghg emitter.

The answer is definitely to the first part. By what ratio depends on who you ask. The nuclear lobby claims 50-80x. Most other people say it's in the 10-20x range.

This is about as good as to somewhat better than wind, but at some point between 2012 and 2030 solar has surpassed/is going to surpass it by whichever measure you choose.

Of course once the steel/silicon/composite/etc comes from low carbon sources, then the embodied carbon reduces as well.

To the second part (while being profitable), no new nuclear build can be profitable, so no.

By that reasoning, a wind park isn't carbon-free electricity either. I wish you good luck on your campaign to convince the public, after that you can come back here and we'll talk again.

If we just look at how much CO2 something produces when it's ready-built we potentially ignore a huge part of the pollution. You usually do a life cycle analysis (LCA) and come up with a g CO2-equivalents/kWh. No energy source has 0g/kWh.

Not to defend nuclear, but it's competitive with solar on that front and better than anything but hydro.

Keeping existing nuclear on as long as it's safe is a pretty clear win climate-wise

But that’s sunk cost. That’s not increasing with consumption unless u get to a point where u have to build a new plant.

This is incorrect. A large nuclear power plant uses about 200000 cubic meters of concrete. Each m3 of concrete contributes about half a ton of CO2 emissions, so that’s a one time 0.1 MT of CO2 emissions. A coal power plant of similar size will emit more than 1 MT every - single - year. There is simply no comparison.

Absolutely hearsay here but a family member worked for SNCF as a mechanic for TGV trains (but not the locomotive) and has said that the pantograph was the limiting factor they had designed the last generation around. That it was designed as a wear part and the top and optimal speeds were chosen based on thresholds for unacceptable wear on the transmission lines themselves, which are much more difficult and expensive to replace. He told me never to expect TGV speeds to increase significantly until we saw them ripping out the powerlines and replacing them with an entirely new system.

Again I don't know if this is true! But it seems reasonable enough to me. That conversation was about twenty years ago and plenty has changed with TGV in the mean time but sure enough no top speeds have increased on any line in the system in that timeframe, and new lines are deployed with the same speeds as the older ones.

I've often wondered why a wheel rolling against the wire wouldn't be better, after all at those speeds you have a wheel rolling against the track and bearing the weight of the train.

Having a low sprung weight is important for pantographs, and getting the 25kV off a rotating contactor would introduce another unhelpful electrical interface I suspect.

If you want to know far more than you did before about overhead line electric systems for railways, from a predominantly British perspective, I can strongly recommend Gary Keenor's (free) book:

https://archive.org/details/overhead-line-electrification-fo...

This correct. Power lines wear induced by pantographs is the limiting factor for TGV top speed.

The engineer that can solve this problem will allow top speeds in the range of 400/500 kph on /existing/ TGV tracks. Much better problem to solve than hacking a lame hyperloop.

> The engineer that can solve this problem will allow top speeds in the range of 400/500 kph on /existing/ TGV tracks.

How is this problem solved in China?

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastest_trains_in_China

They're maglev trains, so there's no pantograph involved there.

https://youtu.be/_ZZMViMDjto at 16:40 explains the problem. It's in french, but you can get the gist visually as it's a for-kids documentary.

Tldr is a wave on the cable is created at high speed, making it impossible for the train to stay in contact with the cable. The documentary also touches on another top speed limitation: how agressive the turn angles are, limiting the top speed.

> They're maglev trains, so there's no pantograph involved there.

The linked wikipedia article also lists speeds of Chinese non-maglev trains.

Ah true, maybe they have higher operating costs on pantograph and/or the power lines maintenance?

(I don't fully believe GP's comment of "The engineer that can solve this problem will allow top speeds in the range of 400/500 kph on /existing/ TGV tracks.", as narrow turns is probably a bigger contraint than the pantograph problem. Maybe a few of the more straight lines can benefit, but there's more constraints to solve before taking turns at 400/500 kph!)

>However, on July 1, 2011 in order to save energy and reduce operating costs, the maximum speed of Chinese high-speed trains was reduced to 300 km/h, and the average speed of the fastest trains on the Wuhan-Guangzhou High-Speed Railway was reduced to 272.68 km/h (169 mph).

Wear and tear is always going to be a limiting factor. Back in 1955, SNCF began its early high-speed research with a record-setting 331 km/h run - this under 1500V DC catenary, boosted to 1800V for the run. Some aerial footage of the run shows spectacular arcing, and they switched pantographs when first one became too damaged.

Newsreel in three parts (in French):

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AyPGkMoGE0

2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpLf4M5OXeQ

3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHWjelxe_MU

Do you know that TGV tickets are very expensive? It's easy to say "faster and larger" when you can afford it. But fitting more people on a train make transportation cheaper for the mass.

I'm French and many friends and family would love to take TGV on holidays but have to ride by bus (search "cars Macron") or by ridesharing (Blablacar) due to the TGV prices.

SNCF recently re-launched some quite old trains under the low-cost "Ouigo Intercités" brand, because demand for cheap-but-slow transportation is more and more popular. I took one from Nantes to Paris this summer (many hours longer than by TGV) and will prefer it next time too. I could fit my bike for free there (vs 10€ in TGV, where I also usually have to disassemble beforehand).

The bus is a much better travel option anyway. Trying to make travel plans with SNCF is a nightmare with their constant strikes.

In which world is the bus not a nightmare?! Waiting for it at a random bus parking where nobody knows where it arrives, almost no ability to walk around nor go to the bathroom, less space than train, no access to your big luggage.. I'm not even talking about speed or efficiency.

Most buses on Europe have gps tracking and updated timetable available online, they are also fairly comfortable.

Most? Can I see the data? I'm imagining you and I exist in parallel Europes.

https://www.flixbus.com/track/

That's not really an answer to my question, but I did my best to dig out the data on this.

As far as I can tell, FlixBus indirectly employs ~7,000[0] drivers, which includes train drivers. There are around 692,000[1] buses in circulation in Europe today.

So I'm struggling to see how your comment supports the idea that most buses in Europe can be monitored with GPS.

[0]: https://www.iru.org/membership/members-directory/flixbus

[1]: https://www.acea.auto/fact/fact-sheet-buses/#:~:text=692%2C2....

The article didn’t mention it will get cheaper. To me it is a bit of a sugarcoating.

Making faster - too hard More seats - more profit Less energy - more profit AND better company image

Good MBA student.

Compared to UK trains the TGV is half the price, twice the speed and double the legroom and cleaner. TGV standard class seats are as good as the First class seats on the West Coast main line.

The problem is that they’re competing against even cheaper air fares.

I thought short haul domestic flights were banned in France?

I haven't taken the TGV in 10 years, but I don't remember it being "very expensive". It was somewhat expensive, but there were also plenty of ways to travel cheaply on the TGV, to the point of being competitive with low-cost air travel, when you account for the fact that getting to/from airports is not free and is time-consuming.

But maybe things have changed in the last 10 years?

Very expensive would be the bullet train in Japan.

You should consider the SNCF Carte Avantage, which is only €49 at full price but goes on sale half off twice a year or so. It saves quite a bit of money on rail tickets, and not just within France.

> Yes we do!

Speed is limited with infrastructure, and France isn't exactly the US. There are not a lot of population centers like Germany which has 14 cities that have more than 500k people while France has four and 20% of the population lives around Paris anyway. You can get from the center of Paris to the center of Marseille (second largest city, other side of the country) in about three hours by TGV.

When you count in the half hour to the airport (optimistic), the security and waiting times (Europeans commonly suggest coming the the airport at least two hours before your flight), the flight is an hour and a half with Ryanair so you can also have a scratch lottery on your luxurious flight, let's say you take half an hour to get your stuff after landing and need half an hour to the city center.

TGV wins, and that's without even mentioning the smoothness of the ride, amenities, leg room, walking around, restaurants and bars. Price is the only thing that goes for air travel in this case, but that's what the government needs to fix.

> No; we want legroom.

Already done.

> We don't want that either. Isn't your electricity nuclear power anyway? What's the problem with consuming too much clean energy?

Last I heard nuclear energy still costs money, clean or not.

So, TGV is very good in this aspect, considering everything. It's not perfect, but it's good enough in more than one way.

Re going faster, exponentially more power is required to do so, and the infrastructure has a limit.

>No, we want legroom.

The Euroduplex rolling stock, of which the Avelia Horizon is the next generation, has better second-class legroom than any highway coach I've been on in my life.

I recently took the TGV from Avignon to Paris. It was fast, clean (a notable improvement from the past), efficient and on time. I was left with my usual feeling: why can't we have this in the US? It will never happen. A confluence of NIMBY, onerous regulation, a judicial system that ensures private contractors have the upper hand in legal disputes, just to name a few reasons will always mean this kind of infrastructure will remain out of reach for most Americans especially those living outside the northeast corridor.

Well, California is working on it, but taking a constant stream of abuse for going over budget. Not sure who else is ever going to sign on for this process. I can't remember the last time and entire nation cared this much about an over-budget freeway program; and there have been plenty.

Not easy here. You see the results of the California high speed rail project. Billions spent with basically nothing to show for it. Buying the land up near the cities they would service is super expensive. I was hoping they could at least connect the Central Valley cities. It may allow people to live where it’s cheaper and commute to the LA area.

Two big differences. The distance between US cities is much further than Europe (aside from the NE USA which does have high speed rail). Also European cities have nice downtowns and good public transport so people do want to go from one city center to another. As opposed to the USA where no one wants to go from say downtown Houston to downtown Denver.

North-East USA does not have high speed rail. Amtrak Acela is not high speed rail.

How long does it normally take to travel between Houston and Denver? If you're flying, I'm guessing it takes more than four hours between the center of each city because of, e.g., airport security theater, check-in, etc.

At TGV speed, I believe that train connection would be about four hours.

The real problem is that, practically speaking, you still need a car once you arrive in either Denver or Houston (because of the way American cities are built).

That implies renting a car at your destination if you ride the train, which eats the time and cost savings (and then some) of taking the train. So why not just use your own car and save the hassle?

Also, non-stop flights on that route have a scheduled time of less than 2.5 hours. Most flight schedules are padded these days to avoid fines for late arrivals, so it's hard to see that the train will be faster, even accounting for TSA. You'd have to make assumptions that don't really hold for the US--like getting to the train stations is faster than getting to the airport. For Houston in particular, the two airports on opposite sides of the city center make this particularly unlikely for a large fraction of the population.

Edit to add: I also think that 4 hours is fairly optimistic for a train between Houston and Denver. That implies a non-stop train running at a constant 350 km/h or 220 mph on the great circle between those two cities. According to wikipedia, the fastest scheduled average speed of a TGV is only 280 km/h (with stops). So that's really closer to a 5.5 hour journey, which I think reinforces the point that it isn't competitive with air travel.

High speed rail between Houston and Denver probably would not make sense, but a high speed rail network within Texas would, connecting Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, Houston, etc. Like I said, though, it will never happen especially in Texas where private interests are sacrosanct and anti-government sentiment runs high.

These are all symptoms of intentional ongoing choices not causes.

Just to add that a poor country such as Morocco (North Africa) has a freaking High Speed Bullet train (french TGV) between Casablanca and Tangiers.

It beats me why the US can’t have one

Just saying

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufactu...

I was about to gripe about trains in the US, but it looks like Amtrak is buying models that look pretty similar to these ones for the next generation of Acela trains[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avelia_Liberty

Between NY and Boston I've never seen the speeds claimed on that Wikipedia page -- not even close.

I only once rode NY->DC and it felt a bit faster, but not hugely so.

I didn't conduct any formal measurements, but I use to be a frequent TGV, ICE, and Shinkansen rider and you can tell you're moving fast by just looking out the window.

Yes the US priorities on rail (freight) means Acela is… not very good. IIRC the current train set has a maximum speed of 240km/h, and because so little of the way is dedicated the average speed end to end is around 110 I think. Kph. On the fastest section between NYC and DC it’s 130, or 80 mph. That’s a car’s speed.

Boston to DC is 735km which Acela covers in 6h45 minutes.

By comparison Paris to Marseilles is 862km which the TGV covers in 3h.

In fact, the “Mistral” which preceded the TGV and ran from 1950 to 1981 covered the distance in 6h40. That’s how bad Acela service is: it compares disfavorably to best-of-class trains from the 60s.

Standard "heavy rail" Amtrak (think: Pacific Surfliner, two stories tall with thundering diesel, https://www.pacificsurfliner.com/plan-your-trip/ ) can run at 120 MPH if the track has positive track control. By some definitions that makes it "high speed rail" heh.

Which the Surfliner didn't in my day (and I think it still doesn't) - but it would hit 90 MPH through Camp Pendleton and I swear my GPS clocked it at 100 once.

Still would beat a car LA station to San Diego station during rush hour traffic.

Despite many claims that Acela is swift, the killer argument is looking at the time difference between Acela scheduled time vs regular trains with only a few stops on the same route.

I happily pay more for Acela because the carriages are more comfortable but if the time is inconvenient I am happy to book a regular train.

Freight priorities on rail don't apply in the Northeast Corridor, almost the entire stretch is owned by Amtrak (unlike the rest of the US). Acela and NE Regional have the right of way up here (with preference given to Acela). The reason it's slow is because the tracks are old and aren't rated for high speeds. They were constructed with sharp(ish) turns during an era of much slower trains which entirely precludes Acela from going 300km/h (like TGV), and only allow for ~240km/h on a tiny stretch between Boston and Providence, and a handful of small stretches between NYC and DC.

I ride the NY<->DC NER and Acela pretty regularly, and I can tell the difference between the two (especially when it's the "nonstop" Acela). NY<->BOS I agree, though -- it's always felt exactly as fast as the NER.

Current Acela trains run at the advertised top speed for a stretch of about 50 miles in Rhode Island, and another even shorter bit in New Jersey. Elsewhere, they're limited to far slower speeds by track (about comparable to European commuter rail lines).

http://www.realtransit.org/nec7.php has some interesting charts and analysis of the speed limits on the various segments of the Northeast Corridor. Note that the values shown are not necessarily what it achieves in practice, but there's seemingly potential to address that via operational changes and small, targeted capital spending.

For the NYC to BOS stretch the Acela is handicapped by politicians in Connecticut.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/30/opinion/path-better-n...

> on that Wikipedia page

The page which says it isn't expected to start service until 2023?

When I first saw the AGV2 trains years ago, I thought the nose looked tacky as hell but it looks a lot better with this prototype livery. Good job Alstom/SNCF. It'll never be as nice as the Atlantique EMUs but not bad.

Can you also fix the byzantine booking system while you're at it?

Sitting on the TGV Lyria while writing this. I have to say it is a great feeling to travel across the country in a few hours. However I think it is the experience around it that make it difficult: Waiting lines at Gare the Lyon never knowing where your train comes and having huge qeues or just the idea that travelling with bags or family squeeze in the metro, still makes me think about flying or driving for certain use-cases.

I think it is mostly a business train to get from A to B (bug cities).

Yup, I’d definitely travel from London to the south of France by train more often if it didn’t mean the Gare du nord - gare de lyon change…

I’ve only done that trip a once by rail. I was blown away by the rail option, it was great. Despite Gare du Nord being disorganised and gross, it was the best international travel I’ve ever done by a huge margin.

One is likely to need a connection at both ends and connecting from a rail hub is a lot simpler than from an airport (and less subject to rip off airport pricing). I loved the space, the comfort, the views and the display showing the speed.

You can connect in Lille, France for TGV service to Montpellier and Marseilles.

There used to be a TGV direct from London to Marseille, at least during the summer season, iirc.

But, IMHO, it's much more convenient and faster to fly from Heathrow to Marseille.

But much more emitting of CO2

>Waiting lines at Gare the Lyon never knowing where your train comes

The platform is announced in your booking application in advance. You can wait anywhere and if it isn't shown a few minutes before departure, you can go near the platform and see where it is on the screens.

I'm French, I don't have a car so frequently travel by train and I've never waited in the station. Families aren't an issue for me either and it's easy to overtake people if you know where you're going. Especially in Gare de Lyon:

- https://www.ratp.fr/sites/default/files/2019-08/gare-de-lyon...

- http://estacions.albertguillaumes.cat/img/paris/lyon.png

Thanks, I didn’t know it is visible in the booking application. Normally the trip is arranged by a booking agency (business trip).

I wanted to take kids (stroller etc) with me but I don’t see them in the metro. How do you get from the big TGV train station to any place in Paris with small kids?

I've seen people with kids every time I've taken the metro in Paris. It seems pretty normal and no different than doing so on any other metro. I don't even think I understand this question. Is there something about the Paris metro that makes it harder than other metros when moving around town with children?

Stairs, pickpockets and the smell (I am French, used to work in Paris for 8years)

This was not my experience recently. German and Italian stations publish printed posters of train schedules and platform numbers but did not see these in any train station in France. Instead, platform numbers are updated at the last possible minute probably to keep the crowd off the platforms, so everyone congregates around the central board waiting for their number, and then rush madly to the platform en masse.

Also, on the French trains the connection platform numbers are only announced in French, so good luck if you're not a native speaker. Italian and German trains announce connections in English and also have LCD monitors on the bulkheads. All in all, I found the French train system the worst in Europe.

(Also, the new French booking app and website is train-wreck level of broken awfulness. And forget trying to book a train ticket across a national border, or several!)

I don’t agree with all of what you said but if there’s one thing I completely agree with it’s the booking website. It is such a pain to book tickets on it.

Agreed. I don't remember how it is in Gare de Lyon, but platforms are usually announced at the last minute for TGV (not TER). It may have something to do with Vigipirate, the counter-terrorism operation?

Gare Part-Dieu in Lyon is one of the worst offenders, sometimes having to change platforms.

We do not talk about the app. (TBH, I don't use proprietary apps, but they also somewhat neutered their website, though I think they still indicate platforms in real time?).

The only thing I'm curious about... there are plenty of LCDs?

Also, I still prefer the experience to taking a car or plane, and can run errands while waiting for the train.

That'sodd. I travel on French trains regularly (Both TGV and local). I have always found the French train system to be easy to navigate, and clearly signed. The trains departures and platforms are always on big screens in the stations.

Platform numbers at the starting station are not usually given until the train is ready for boarding (usually 15-30 mins before boarding), but this is pretty standard across Europe.

Why are you expecting announcements in a language that is a foreign language in both the departure station and destination?

> on the French trains the connection platform numbers are only announced in French, so good luck if you're not a native speaker

Funny, when I went from DC to NYC with Armtrack, the platform numbers were only announced in American, so good luck if you are not a native speaker.

well, if the SNCF could also pour some of that money in secondary/regional lines too, it'd be swell

That's on regional administrations, not the SNCF

I thought the SNCF *was* all the regional authorities and also the owners of the rail lines.

Some regions operate TER trains themselves.

The SNCF is currently the only operator of regional train lines in France, but it's the regions that decide what lines are run and on what budget. They also own or lease the trains. The rails are indeed owned by SNCF Réseau.

There is also "Chemins de fer de Provence"[0] separate from the SNCF. I took it once in the 80s when I was kid traveling from Nice to somewhere in the Maritime Alps for a day. I remember a rickety old train that did not travel fast, but nevertheless had its charms.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemins_de_fer_de_Provence

Edit: The French Wikipedia page is quite a bit more interesting: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemins_de_fer_de_Provence

So how many Wh/mile can it do?

The old one did around 20kWh/km and they claim 32% less CO2 per passenger. Perhaps including the construction too, but that shouldn’t change a lot.

So let’s say 14kWh/km (or about 8 times the recommended food energy per day for an average person, per mile).

That actually seems like an awful lot...

A tesla model 3 is 250 wh/mile. so 56 cars energy = 1 trains energy.

The train has steel wheels (far lower rolling resistance) and a far more aerodynamic shape... But also has the downside of far more weight, probably less efficient motors and power electronics, limited regen ability, and faster speed (air losses are the third power of speed)

The train also has 740 passengers. 56 Tesla model 3 could fit 280 people (a bit tight in the middle back seat).

And yes, the model 3 cannot average 300km/h. Still it shows that trains could be better.

> 56 cars energy = 1 trains energy.

These trains accommodate around 500 passengers though, while a car is generally max 5 passengers.

So the trains are about ten times more efficient, and two to three times as far.

And an average tesla does not have 5 ppl in it, from what I can see its more like 1.5, whereas you typical train seems to be 60% full (personal experience).

Each TGV seats 500-700 people, about 100 to 500 times better than you RR average model 3. And goes a lot faster. I'd be curious to know the M3's mileage above 300 kph.

I thought regenerative braking was a strong point of trains? The motor is probably of comparable efficiency, I expect power electronics to be worse, indeed.

The train is capable of regen braking... But frequently the infrastructure is not. A train braking can be many megawatts of power, something that can't be dumped on the electricity grid of a small town without a bit of planning in advance.

So, where capacity to dump the power can't be certain, regen braking isn't done, or is at least limited.

This sounds like a great application for supercapacitors. Regen charge the caps when braking to enter a station, and use that energy to accelerate back out of the station

A 400t train at 300km/h is a gigajoule or two.

That's a decent chunk of the weight of the train in capacitors.

> A tesla model 3 is 250 wh/mile. so 56 cars energy = 1 trains energy.

Do that calculation again with 12 people in the tesla and have it moving at over 300km/h on average.

Don't forget to include the 30 sets of tyres per 8hrs of driving and a new battery every 100-500hrs

Aww man, I wish we had these in Austria. Don't get me wrong, the trains here are nice, but they are sooo slow that most of the times it's quicker and cheaper to get to your destination by car on the Autobahn, especially if you just buy the ticket a few days before the journey without any discounts and pay full price.

ÖBB is leading the pack on the sleeper train front though. Wien, Graz, Innsbruck, all linked up to the rest of Europe on a neat network of NightJet trains. The next generation of rolling stock for the sleeper cars looks amazing too.

Sure, but Graz - Vienna train route is still slow as shit and that's Austria's second city. The train travels at like ~100km/h average or something, which is pathetic compared to high speed trains in Germany or France.

I get that this could be a limitation of the Austrian landscape making fast train infra challenging, but even a Flixbus traveling on the slow lane on the Autobahn gets you there ~30 min faster and at half the price of OBB.

The trains are nice and the service is great, but the speeds are a joke for the price of the non-discounted tickets as even traveling on the autobahn by bus can be faster on most routes.

To think that we could have maglev trains in europe for 40 years now...

It was a political decision back than. German stopped being great long time ago and the Transrapid cancellation was just the beginning of German downturn. The energy crisis will be the last episode of Germany's long depression.

the last episode of Germany's long depression

Last or latest? Calling it the last makes it sound hopeful, but your post doesn't exactly read like that.

Sometimes the last bad thing means that good things are coming. Other times, it means that nothing more is coming.

So you would rather have built completely new tracks, stations and other infrastrusture, which can only be used with in-system trainsets and will most likely be completely incompatible with anything running on other european rails for decades? No possibility of dual-use with older sleeper trains, regional trains or freight trains?

I would argue the decision was not as bad as you make it out to be.

That argument is the root cause why we stopped investing in innovation and infrastructure.

The same could have been said about airports, highways, trains, electricity, the internet.

Current train travel is a joke in germany, the infrastructure is failing, the prices and shedules are an international meme.

One of the main reason it sucks so much is having shared cargo and passenger rail. The successfull high speed trains are using their tracks exclusively.

If we had started investing 40 years ago we would all be cruising silently at 460kmh with tickets half the price, because of the maintenance free solid state tech.

Transrapid is also more wheelchair accessible because it is level with the platform and the cabin is much wider.

Also remember that stupid solar roadways idea? Guess where that actually works, in between the transrapid rails. By covering the center of the pylons in solar a route from bremen to hamburg would produce enough energy to replace 1 1/2 coal power plants.

I agree with you that there is too little investment in infrastructure in germany. But maglev was researched extensively and then we decided against it.

> the prices and shedules are an international meme.

Regarding prices: those are actually very reasonable prices for High-speed-trains. Look up tickets on TGV or Shinkansen. ICE tickets are starting at 20 euros. Regional rail is indeed worse but we're arguing about high-speed rail vs maglev. And Maglev is so much more expensive to build, I simply can't see how that would lead to better prices (or schedules/being on time for that matter, which mostly depend on the bad infrastructure and are "just" made worse by the fact that other trains run there)

> Transrapid is also more wheelchair accessible because it is level with the platform and the cabin is much wider.

Sure, ICE trains are bad for accessibility. But that is not due to the tracks they run on but rather due to accessibility not being a priority when designing the trains. Regional trains show that it can be done without bigger problems

> Also remember that stupid solar roadways idea?

The one that failed everywhere they tried?

> Guess where that actually works, in between the transrapid rails. By covering the center of the pylons in solar a route from bremen to hamburg would produce enough energy to replace 1 1/2 coal power plants.

Or you could place them literally anywhere else, there is no shortage of space to put solar panels in.

But to end on a more friendly note: Maglevs are indeed a bit cheaper to service and the fast accelleration is really helpful for those relatively short distances between city centers in some regions. But as was stated in another comment: try building a new line which actually goes from main station to main station. You're going to need space (or tunnels) in city centers and the space between and this will be expensive and tedious. 40 years ago this might have been easier but even then we wouldn't have had a network from the start.

> But maglev was researched extensively and then we decided against it.

The people against it were the Boomer-Greens, the same generation that got us Harz-IV and favoured Coal over Nuclear. Their anti-transrapid standpoint was just a political counter point to the policy of the CDU, which is absolutely insane, considering that todays greens would be super happy if the CDU started to propose better faster trains.

The BUND (Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz) made some wild claims about bird sanctuaries, ignoring the fact that the reduced noise level and lower ground area requirements would have been a huge improvement for bird sanctuaries, compared to ICE. The same BUND that has a working group against cell towers and community wifi because of RaDIAtioN.

> Regarding prices: those are actually very reasonable prices for High-speed-trains.

That's only if you book months in advance, and even then it's often cheaper to take the plane, which is absolutely insane.

> Maglev is so much more expensive to build

At 17Mio/Euro per double KM, it's EXACLY the same as high-speed ICE tracks. The more costly linear accelerator tech is set of by the cheaper pylons. Turns out preparing the ground and piling up a 5m pile of Gravel is really really expensive.

> I simply can't see how that would lead to better prices

The main ticket price contributor is not the tracks, it's energy and maintenance. Both are significantly reduced for a contact free system with no moving parts and no vibrations.

> The one that failed everywhere they tried? Because solar panels don't like being driven on. But the Transrapid would just float over the solar panels embedded into the center of the track.

You might argue that one could also put solar panels in between regular train track, but the vibration and material dust would quickly render them useless.

> Or you could place them literally anywhere else, there is no shortage of space to put solar panels in.

NIMBY NIMBY NIMBY. With solar transrapid pylons kill two birds with one stone, the track even provides the infrastructure to transport the electricity.

You also forget that the self contained shuttle design of the Transrapid would allow for completely new routing schemes. Instead of a fixed timetable you could use much more flexible "package" based routing, where trains are scheduled on demand. You'd also be able to save a lot of energy lost in regenerative breaking at ever stop by booking a single train from say, Hamburg to Rome, without any stops.

As appealing as Maglev trains are, the world still invests heavily in steel wheel trains due to reliability and easier scaling out to meet demand. We haven't solved issues with magnet reliability on maglevs on the scale that steel wheel trains have resolved.

The current limiting factor in scaling out trains in germany is NIMBYs. Ad train system that is significantly more silent, with a lower area footprint due to pylon tracks has a serious advantage there.

If you cover the track in solar panels you get the additional argument that it replaces "ugly wind turbines in their backyard" (their words not mine, I love the sight of wind turbines).

> pylon tracks [...] "ugly wind turbines in their backyard"

Instead they'd complain about ugly pylons in their backyard, so I'm not sure if that would have been that much of an improvement.

Those pylons are a much easier to swallow pill than wind turbines with their shadows and noise + train noises.

I would settle for building the high-speed trains of the present.

Plane designers figured out long ago that for the best aerodynamics you don't actually want a pointy nose - a big hemisphere like the bottom of a raindrop performs best.

So why does this have a pointier nose? Just for PR?

I think pointier noses and air flow matter more for tunnel travel due to the piston effect, so it does matter here.

¿Maybe a desire to create some downforce to keep the train on its track?

There also is a difference in velocity and in expected air pressure, airplanes don’t have to bother about not creating pressure waves for planes passing them at a few meters distance while flying in the reverse direction and airplanes are relatively much longer than air planes compared to their width. That means that a much larger fraction of the air resistance comes from the sides of the train.

are you sure planes aerodynamics weren't tailored to 3d movements while a train isn't ?

No, commercial jets have a blunt nose for structural reasons and pilot visibility while landing. SR-71, F-16 and so on all have pointy noses.

Pointy noses in military craft are to reduce the radar cross section - it actually performs worse.

A round nose has a flat bit at the front which reflects radar direct back towards the enemy that you're flying towards. Military planes generally have no surfaces facing directly forwards for that reason - even surfaces made of plastics reflect some radar when they get wet.

As you go deeper into transonic and supersonic pointy nose is lower drag.

The F-16 has a targeting radar mounted on a flat bulkhead. It's nose is effectively transparent.

This isn’t really true, the military aircraft fly faster and at those speeds pointy noses help.

Passenger airliners travel at slower speeds for which more round noses are actually better (eg to prevent flow detachment).

In fact, iirc I read somewhere that Airbus’s more blunt noses are the result of newer CFD-based design techniques whereas Boeing reuses their pointy nose from previous designs.

I assume on a train or everything else that is supposed to be on the ground you want downforce, whereas on a plain you might not mind less downforce and more lift? I would guess the shape helps with that.

The shape is quite similar to Shinkansen, which have it to limit compression waves when entering tunnels at high speeds.

This sounds like the reason...

I can imagine that 100 year old bridges have a habit of dropping bricks on trains that send massive pressure waves every 10 minutes all day long...

Bridges are not really the issue, they have a lot of space to dissipate the shockwave.

However the manufacturer might be expecting a significant business through the alps, given the base tunnels Switzerland has been digging.

That would make high-speed tunnel entry a larger concern than it’s historically been for the french market (most of the tall mountains are on the edges of france so high speed lines don’t have a surfeit of tunnels, probably unlike japan which is rather mountainous).

Yes, in fact the first deployment of these trains will be over the france-italy frontier (despite what this article says, I read the opposite in french news, and premiering a TGV on the Paris network makes no sense at all).

...maybe the people who design trains and run expensive modeling on them understand the actual design constraints better than you do?

Might be better to honestly ask why rather than starting by trying to insinuate that the people who designed this are idiots or did it only for PR.

Your comment rubbed me the wrong way. Here's why, in case it's helpful:

You act as if you have expertise in aerodynamics, but don't share the sort of details an expert would. An expert would say something along the lines of, "Cool fact: big hemispheres are more aerodynamic, but the TGV chose a pointy nose because of X, Y, Z." Or even, "Big hemispheres are more aerodynamic, but also involve engineering tradeoffs X, Y, and Z. I wonder if that's why they went with a pointy nose?"

That kind of comment would be awesome! Informative and interesting. Instead, your comment across both arrogant and ignorant. Arrogant in that you assume that any deviation from your understanding is wrong, and ignorant because your proposed rationale is extremely unlikely, and flamebait besides.

IIRC, it's more or less inspired by the Kingfisher's beak[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingfisher

Two words for you to meditate upon : Chesterton, Fence

It would have been a better question if you left out the "Just for PR?". That gives the indication that you aren't particularly interested in the answer if that's the only reason you suspect.

What exactly improves PR for a train having a pointy nose vs a rounded nose?

A tgv train is abput 12m^2 and moves around 80m/s

Wave drag of 1/2*rho*v**3 is about 4 megawatts for air. Long sides will reattach flow somewhat even with a bad shape.

With steel on steel so 0.001 to 0.002 m * C_rr * v^2 is about 2.5 to 5 MW. At a full load maybe even 6 or 7MW.

I have nfi how to do skin drag, but it's probably around the same order.

Thus we conclude that once Cd is below 0.5ish other concerns start to become a lot more pressing.

Namely tunnel shockwaves, passing suction, driver space and comfort, crash ratings, down force for the engine car, and so on.

Even if it looks cool so 10% more people use it, that's a net efficiency win.

Same reason as the Shinkansen, it’s less about open air aerodynamics and more about tunnel exit noise.

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